By this spring, scientists will
have produced a comprehensible rough draft of our genome, the 3
billion-word instruction book for human biology. This map of the
entire human genetic structure will contain clues to all of our
afflictions, all of our gifts, unlocking a trove of information
richer and more precise than any biological data that has preceded it.

And it will be mostly nonsense.

Amongst the bits of genetic code suggesting blue eyes,
left-handedness, and curiosity, scientists are detecting blatherous
twine such as this: hxckgggcaggaxglopl-
hxckgggc-aggaxglopl-hxckgg-gcaggaxglopl- hxckgggcag-gaxglopl-hxckg
-ggcaggaxglopl-hxckgggca -ggaxglopl. Vast portions of the genome 
most of it, in fact  are made up of random character repetitions
with no apparent purpose or function, like empty miles between West
Texas towns.

At this basic, genetic level, the worthless DNA could be taken as
proof there exists no such thing as human purpose: Human beings
aren't the result of unified genetic cooperation, but are instead
motivated by the winners in a game of microscopic chaos. It's every
bit of unconscious code against every other bit of unconscious code.

Some of the code perseveres by creating traits sustainable
through the perpetuation of species, such as large brains in humans.
The rest survives by merely fighting for space along our DNA.

This second type of prodigious swapping and replicating creates
harmless errors, strings of parasitic DNA that compound themselves
across generations, making each individual's genome more distinct
every time it's passed along. This discovery in 1984 made possible
the new science of DNA fingerprinting: Most biological material
contains in its parasitic DNA a unique bar code, an infallible
identification of the material's source.

This fact was initially used by immigration authorities a decade
and a half ago to investigate family-unification claims of would-be
immigrants. Two years later, a DNA mismatch proved the innocence of a
falsely confessed British rapist. Later still, DNA evidence showed
how former Argentine military rulers had secretly adopted as their
own the children of murdered leftist parents. Now, rare is the
paternity battle, rape case, or murder crime scene that doesn't
include DNA analysis.

Anthony Pidgeon

Peter
Barnett, a Richmond private investigator who was sent around the
world in search of Larry Hillblom's DNA.

It's often said the truth can be cruel. But inside the ruthless
battleground of the human genome, cruelty produces unassailable
truth.

So it is fitting that life's most self-serving terrain might
bring closure to one of recent history's more astounding pageants of
amoral behavior.

This month, accountants will distribute $50 million apiece to a
quartet of children left behind by deceased San Francisco billionaire
Larry Hillblom. Such was the value of their junk DNA.

By examining genes from an octet of Pacific Asian dance-hall
orphans, a team of Bay Area sleuths has solved the mystery of whether
Hillblom was merely a misunderstood eccentric, or a deadbeat
pedophile. They helped solve the mystery of whether attorneys for the
state of California acted merely as responsible public stewards, or
aggressively attempted to deny impoverished orphans their rightful
inheritance.

They determined, in short, that some participants in a
just-finished battle over the estate of Hillblom, founder of the
globe-spanning DHL Worldwide Express air freight company, behaved so
consistently and entirely without scruples that it seemed as though,
perhaps, amorality was in their genes.

This puzzle's eventual solution could just as easily have
remained concealed forever. Hillblom's former partners, their $20
million worth of attorneys, and the California state Attorney
General's Office might have prevailed in their assertion that
Hillblom's former girlfriends were liars. But thanks to genetic
science and some cutting-edge sleuthing, the truth prevailed.

Charles Brenner, a genial middle-aged
bachelor, lives in an airy, well-lighted duplex in a shady
neighborhood in the hills next to the University of California at
Berkeley. He is a passionate fan of classical music, a tendency
revealed by the artwork, sheet music, and sophisticated stereo
equipment scattered throughout his house. He travels frequently, and
takes bicycle rides near his home on weekends when he's not on the
road. Years ago, while young and living in Britain, he was a
professional bridge player, and he still keeps tabs on the
international game. He is a pleasant, invigorating raconteur,
knowledgeable about many things, curious about the rest. In manner 
and by nature of his line of work  he brings to mind L.B.
Jefferies, Jimmy Stewart's armchair sleuth character in the movie
Rear Window.

"As a mathematician," Brenner demurs, "I don't get out much."

As was the case with Mr. Jefferies, this is true in only the most
banally literal of ways. Brenner isn't just any mathematician. He's a
forensic mathematician, a term Brenner coined to describe his
specialty, which uses complex computer calculations to add meaning to
the variance and similarities among disparate strands of DNA. This
science involves calculating the statistical likelihood that one
piece of code might be similar to another. A student of numbers
theory, Brenner has fashioned himself into one of the leaders in this
field, designing computer programs that calculate the nature of
biological relationships between individuals based on information in
the genome. In one recent project he invented a scheme for proving
whether a person is white or black, European or Japanese, based on
snippets of his genome.

Most biological material
contains in its parasitic DNA a unique bar code, an infallible
identification of the material's source.

"There are lots of parts of the genome which are polymorphic 
that's to say they vary from person to person," Brenner says. "If you
have a variant form of polymorphic loci that you share with another
person, it could be that you are related, or it could be a
coincidence. If you can compare several loci, and they are the same,
you can rule out coincidence. With parents, you share half of these
DNA. With half-siblings, you'll share a quarter."

In other words, Brenner uses genetic samples and mathematical
probabilities to establish with a reasonable degree of certainty
whether two people are related, and the closeness of their family
relationship.

Brenner's knowledge has been called into play to identify the
remains of people killed in an airline crash. His expertise once took
him to Korea, where two brothers, heirs to an estate, wished to
refute the claims of two older men who had stepped forward claiming
to be their secret half-brothers. As it turned out, all four men
were, indeed, family.

Fascinating, indeed. But for Brenner  and for dozens of
attorneys, accountants, judges, private investigators, and genetic
specialists  one case looms above the rest. It is the battle over
the $600 million estate of Larry Hillblom. It is a tale that combined
pedophilia, tropical island madams, battling law firms, high-stakes
political deal-making, extortion, lost evidence, state-sanctioned
conniving against Third World orphans, and millions and millions and
millions of dollars. Best of all, it involved some cutting-edge DNA
analysis.

If the unlimited-babes-'n'-bucks fantasy
lifestyle depicted in magazines such as Maxim were to come to
life in a real human being, that person might have been Larry
Hillblom. He was Midas-like in his knack for accumulating wealth, and
uniquely single-minded in his quest for young, young women.

Hillblom was a lawyer, briefly clerking for San Francisco's
Melvin Belli. But not long after Hillblom graduated from Berkeley's
Boalt Hall, he changed direction, launching the courier company DHL
in 1969 on a shoestring. He founded the company initially to deliver
shipping documents by air courier to ports of call days before cargo
ships arrived, so that vessels could be unloaded quickly and be on
their way. The company grew into an international air courier, and
Hillblom was a millionaire by the time he turned 30. By his early
50s, Hillblom had amassed a fortune worth as much as a billion
dollars. By the mid-1990s, DHL was the world's largest shipping
company, with $5.7 billion in revenue and 60,000 employees. While not
as famous in the U.S. as Federal Express, overseas DHL is so
ubiquitous that its name is synonymous with next-day-air shipping in
the same manner that the word "Coke" is used to mean "soft drink."

Anthony Pidgeon

Charles
Brenner was called in when a sample of Hillblom's DNA could not be
located.

In 1980, with DHL's success well established, Hillblom decided to
turn to his next love: having unprotected sex with post-pubescent
girls. At the time, he kept these proclivities private to most of the
world. But after his death and the estate battle that followed, his
sexual preferences and lifestyle became widely reported.

He moved from the Bay Area to Saipan, a tropical tax haven a
thousand miles off the southeast coast of Japan. Hillblom made
himself into a Micronesian kingpin, launching dozens of businesses
and investing in land development projects in the Philippines,
Hawaii, and Vietnam. He bought European castles and hotels, a Chinese
jet, an airline called Continental Micronesia. He helped bail out
giant Continental Airlines and made a bundle on the deal. He ran for
political office. As a committed eccentric and one of Micronesia's
richest men, he became a local celebrity.

His laid-back lifestyle was more befitting a sandal-wearing beach
rat than an international tycoon. He was fond of fast food. He wore
jeans and a T-shirt to high-level business meetings. He owned a
mansion in Saipan, and residences in Manila, Hawaii, and Half Moon
Bay. His hobbies included high-end stereo equipment, boats,
airplanes, fancy cars, and a continuous stream of barely blossomed
girls.

Contemporary photographs depict Hillblom as a pale, small-eyed
man  not the sort of person who ordinarily enjoys serial romantic
conquests with the young. But Hillblom had other qualities to his
credit: money, and more significantly a network of madams who would
fix him up with teenage bar girls and waitresses  some as young as
13. Typically, he slept with one of them for a few weeks, treating
her as an ordinary person might treat a girlfriend. He would bestow
gifts on her, take her to dinner, give her money, sometimes providing
cash assistance to her poor family. Then, he would dump her for the
next one.

Despite his peculiarities, Hillblom is remembered as a brilliant
man. As such he might have recognized that his teen-sex hobby would
put him at risk for disease. But Hillblom's tropical fantasy didn't
include condoms. Supposedly he said they blunted his pleasure. So he
instructed madams in Micronesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam to
procure only girls who swore they had been chaste.

In 1993, Hillblom's plain appearance was further marred by a
nasty airplane crash on a Pacific island near his Saipan home.
Doctors at the University of California Medical Center in San
Francisco managed to put him back together reasonably well, removing
a large mole from his face during convalescence. Grateful, Hillblom
promised to include the hospital in his will. The mole was put in
storage at Davies Medical Center, and Hillblom returned to Saipan.
His brush with death didn't seem to produce any philosophical
epiphanies. He continued hitting up his madams for new girls.

By examining genes from an octet of Pacific Asian dance-hall
orphans, a team of Bay Area sleuths has solved the mystery of whether
Hillblom was merely a misunderstood eccentric, or a deadbeat
pedophile.

And, to some of his girlfriends' eventual benefit, he kept
traveling in unstable light aircraft.

On May 21, 1995, Hillblom, his pilot, and a business partner took
off for Saipan in Hillblom's twin-engine seaplane from nearby Pagan
Island on a short-hop business trip, but bad weather turned them
back. Soon after, dispatchers lost track of the plane, and the next
morning a search was launched. Search crews found parts of the plane,
and a day later the sodden bodies of Hillblom's companions. After a
week the search was called off. Hillblom was given up for dead. The
body was never found.

After the search crews finished, crews of attorneys from both
sides of the Pacific went to work. As painstaking as Hillblom had
been in many areas of his life, he had written a sloppy will. He had
spent years having unprotected sex with young East Asian and Pacific
Islander women, yet had failed to provide  either for, or against
 any children he might have sired. California would have allowed
him to write his unacknowledged children out of his will. As it was,
anyone who could prove to be his child would be entitled to an
inheritance.

Weeks after Hillblom's death, several young women emerged from
Vietnam, the Philippines, and the Islands of Micronesia claiming that
Hillblom had taken up with them briefly and left them with children.
In modern times such claims are routinely proven or disproven using
DNA fingerprinting techniques. But Hillblom disappeared without
leaving a physical trace. Without such evidence, there was no way to
conduct a traditional paternity test. Some of his sample DNA was
needed.

"As it was, they were going to attempt to locate some biological
samples that could be used as reference material for a paternity
test," says Peter Barnett, a forensic investigator in Richmond,
retained by attorneys for the claimed orphaned children.

If found, a piece of Hillblom DNA would provide irrefutable proof
that the children's claims were valid, or not. Without such proof, it
would be the word of a group of dance-hall orphans against the state
of California, and several millions of dollars' worth of San
Francisco white-shoe lawyers.

That elusive bit of reference material became the subject of a
massive treasure hunt. If any biological material left by Hillblom
were to surface  a piece of hair in the carpet of one of his homes,
sweat on a sheet, the mole preserved in wax at UC San Francisco  it
would provide definitive proof or refutation of the putative heirs'
claims.

On the one side of this struggle stood Hillblom's relatives,
three Hillblom associates involved in the management of Hillblom's
estate's charitable foundation, the University of California, and the
California Attorney General's Office. He had left $300,000 each to
his two brothers and the rest to a charitable trust, much of which
was to go to the UC system for medical research. The trust was to be
managed by his brothers and the DHL associates.

On the other side were the children, their mothers, and scrappy
Micronesian lawyer David Lujan.

Anthony Pidgeon

Edward
Blake, a leading DNA expert, calls the Hillblom case "the mother of
all paternity cases."

So the search was on for a piece 
however small  of Larry Hillblom's genetic code. Attorneys hired a
top-drawer private dick to scan the globe.

Peter Barnett, the Richmond forensic investigator assigned to the
trail of the phantom DNA, recalls the episode with bemusement. "They
were going to try to locate some biological samples that could be
used as reference material for a paternity test," says Barnett, whose
warm personal touch and vast trove of forensic knowledge give him the
air of an intellectual everyman. "They contacted us to go out and try
to locate some of it."

First, Barnett hopped the 14-hour flight to Saipan to comb
Hillblom's mansion for signs of former life. For the primary home of
a man reputed to have enjoyed a casual lifestyle, the house had an
unusual feel to it, Barnett recalls.

"I went over to Saipan and spent a couple of days at his house,"
Barnett says. "When we were at his house, we noticed there was little
evidence of a male occupant of a house. There were no toilet
articles, no clothes. There was nothing we could hang our hat on at
this point."

In 1980, with DHL's success well established, Hillblom decided to
turn to his next love: having unprotected sex with post-pubescent
girls.

As it so happened, somebody  no one was saying who  had
completely scoured the Hillblom mansion. More than scoured, it had
been sanitized, the orphans' lawyer alleged.

So Barnett went to Half Moon Bay, where Hillblom owned property.
He spent an entire day traversing narrow dirt trails seeking a small
cabin Hillblom used to visit when seeking solitude.

The orphans' poker hand included a disembodied mole set in wax at
the Davies Medical Center. That was where Hillblom had convalesced
after his 1993 air crash, and where doctors had removed his blemish.
Davies Medical Center is part of the UC system, which, as a
benefactor in Hillblom's will, was among the children's adversaries.

Just the same, the hospital agreed to relinquish the telltale
mole. Barnett recalls traversing a phalanx of lawyers at the hospital
entrance.

"I went over to the hospital and picked up a sample they
presented to me as belonging to Hillblom," Barnett says. "But it
turned out that it wasn't actually from Hillblom. Everyone was
running around trying to figure out what happened."

The implications were obvious: The hospital claiming the mix-up
had a direct material interest in the absence of Hillblom's genetic
material. Nonetheless, it was never proven that the hospital had lost
the mole on purpose.

Lujan, the children's attorney, meanwhile, had been spending time
talking up contacts around Saipan, tracking down a rumor that one of
Hillblom's old girlfriends had been enlisted to sanitize the mansion.

According to a deposition obtained by Lujan, the girlfriend "had
been instructed to clean the house and put his effects into plastic
bags," Barnett recalls. "Someone came by with a backhoe and buried it
in the back yard. Lujan went over to Saipan and began talking to
backhoe operators."

Once learning the whereabouts of the Hillblom clothing trove,
Lujan had the bags dug up again. Barnett, the forensic evidence
expert, was once again summoned to comb through Hillblom's property.

"Whether those clothes had been laundered to be thrown away, I
don't know," Barnett says. "But they were laundered."

Other genetic information Barnett obtained from Hillblom's
properties was either too inconsequential, or from too uncertain a
provenance to be of any use. So the claims of the Hillblom heirs
remained just that, weakly based assertions resting on circumstantial
evidence.

With no known sample of his DNA, the
judges, attorneys, forensic experts, and geneticists seeking to
resolve the riddle of Hillblom's private past seemed to have run out
of cards to play. Hillblom's mother and brother  who possessed DNA
similar to Larry Hillblom  refused to proffer blood samples.

So, for all the DNA evidence available to his offsprings'
lawyers, Hillblom may as well not have lived in this world.

But Hillblom did live in this world. And scientific sleuths were
able to prove that he lived exactly the way Pacific island legend
said he did, leaving microscopic eddies of unique junk DNA in the
genetic makeup of his children.

It occurred to experts in the claimed orphans' legal team that if
they could show through DNA analysis that children scattered
throughout the eastern Pacific shared a large number of genetic
traits, they could be shown to share the same father.

"We were in the unusual  unprecedented in fact  position of
trying to decide, using DNA, whether children are related to a man
about whom, DNA-wise, nothing is known. We therefore had to employ an
indirect strategy," says Charles Brenner, who was hired to do the
mathematical calculations determining the probability that the
children were related.

The strategy was first suggested by Peter Neufeld, a New York
attorney retained by one of Lujan's clients, 15-year-old Junior
Hillbroom (his mother misspelled the name on the birth certificate,
according to press reports).

"Once you develop the frequencies for the genes they have in
common, and after you do the genetic profiling, you say that this
coincidence can be explained one of two ways: a coincidence; or,
because they had the same daddy," Neufeld says. "What we were able to
do is show that it was a million times more likely that these kids
would have the same genes if they had the same father, as opposed to
by coincidence."

Data obtained from the DNA comparison of the orphans was shipped
to Brenner, who ran it through a computer program of his own design.
The result: Four impoverished eastern Pacific children  a boy named
Lory, 4, of Vietnam; Jellian Cuartero, 5, and Mercedita Feliciano, 4,
of the Philippines; and Junior Larry Hillbroom, of Guam, all seemed
to have had, beyond any reasonable doubt, the same father.

Their mothers had already produced troves of evidence that
Hillblom had indeed consorted with them.

It occurred to experts in the claimed orphans' legal team
that if they could show through DNA analysis that children scattered
throughout the eastern Pacific shared a large number of genetic
traits, they could be shown to share the same father.

"The circumstantial evidence was lovely; that's what got them to
the lawsuit in the first place," says Neufeld. "It was the scientific
evidence that finally got them a settlement. They can say that until
they were blue in the face, but if you can prove that it's 100,000
times more likely that he has those genes because he's the son of
Larry Hillblom, that trumps everything else."

So on April 15 lawyers for the estate of Hillblom and lawyers for
his four children will meet in a Saipanese courtroom to work out the
final details of how the orphans will receive $50 million each as
their rightful inheritance.

"Without a doubt, as far as paternity investigations are
concerned, the Hillblom case is the mother of all paternity cases.
The complexity, the cleverness of the approach, and the positive
outcome make it so," says Ed Blake, a Richmond forensic geneticist.
"The stakes are so high, the problem is sufficiently difficult, the
solution is very clever, and it all works out."

In the end, a judge ordered Hillblom's brother and mother to
either submit to genetic testing, or face financial penalties. The
tests confirmed what Neufeld and Brenner's cross-referencing test had
already shown  four of the eight claimants were Hillblom's
children.

The flotsam and jetsam of the children's genetic codes allowed
the truth to be told, and four impoverished children will recover
their financial birthright.